As a container that stores a liquid material such as shampoo, hair conditioner, hand soap or the like such that the liquid material can be dispensed, what is widely employed is a pump-equipped container that includes: a container body having a mouth portion; and a manual dispenser pump that is removably attached to the mouth portion. A push-down operation applied to an operation portion of the dispenser pump projecting upwardly from the container body allows the content stored in the container body to be discharged from a dispenser nozzle provided at the operation portion.
Normally, the container body of the pump-equipped container is structured to have enough strength and stiffness so as not to easily be crushed by hands at least. After the content is finished up, the dispenser pump is removed from the mouth portion of the container body, and the container body is charged with the content from a refill pouch, so that the dispenser pump and the container body can repeatedly be used. However, when the container body is to be refilled with the content, the content must be poured into the mouth portion of the container body while the soft pouch is held in hand in a state where the empty container body is placed on the floor or the like. Such work takes time and is very troublesome. Furthermore, sometimes the position of the container body and that of the pouch are displaced from each other, resulting in spilling of the content. Therefore, there has been a great demand of the user for simplification of refilling work.
Accordingly, what is also proposed is a pump-equipped container, in which a thin container body that can be crushed by hands to achieve a reduction in volume is employed as the container body. When the content is finished up, the dispenser pump is removed from the container body to be attached to the refill container body filled with the content. The empty container body is crushed and discarded (e.g., see Patent Documents 1 and 2).
Meanwhile, in the case where a thin container body such as described above is used, in order to prevent the container body from being damaged by the push-down operation force that occurs when the operation portion is pushed downwardly to discharge the content, it is necessary to provide a support structure that receives the pushdown operation force of the operation portion.
As the support structure, Patent Document 1 discloses a support structure in which: a suction pipe of a dispenser pump having the strength and stiffness enough to receive the push-down operation force of the operation portion is used; a support element that abuts on the bottom portion of the container body is rotatably provided at the bottom end portion of the suction pipe; and the push-down operation force of the operation portion is received by the support element and the suction pipe. Further, Patent Document 2 discloses a support structure which is provided with a support pipe externally provided to a suction pipe; the bottom portion of the support pipe is branched into three to form three leg portions; the bottom end portion of each of the three leg portions is allowed to abut on the bottom face of the container body, whereby the push-down operation force of the operation portion is received by the support pipe.
On the other hand, what is proposed is a mouth member-equipped container as a container that stores jelly-like food, including a rectangular parallelepiped-shape soft container body having gusset portions, the gusset portions being provided at a pair of side faces opposing to each other and capable of being folded inwardly (e.g., see Patent Document 3).